Another perspective

This blog posting provides an interesting perspective on the "Ivory-bill" situation. The author is a patent lawyer who has previously blogged about the Hwang stem cell scandal.

An excerpt (the bold font is mine):

One reader asked of the relation of the woodpecker story to intellectual property. At an abstract level, the woodpecker story shows how an article published in a prestigious journal such as Science can create economic value. The published article generated a pledge of $10 million from Congress. Further, before going public, the Nature Conservancy/Cornell bought up land, giving them an economic interest that the story be believed. This issue of imprimatur is quite similar to the complaints of Bob Park about the Patent Office granting patents to BlackLight. Although the underlying science (certainly in Park's eyes) might be false, the grant of the patent created economic value for BlackLight, because they can get investors by pointing to the patent. Similarly, Cornell caused certain things to happen by pointing to the paper in Science. If the story proves false, there has been a misallocation of resources. This would be similar in theme to the misallocation of resources caused in the Jan-Hendrik Schon flap, wherein publications in the journal Science (ultimately retracted) caused other people (and the federal government) to invest in areas which had little chance of generating any academic or financial payout. The issue of imprimatur is also relevant to the problems the journal Science has had in publishing the false work of Woo Suk Hwang. There the underlying science was unquestionably wrong. Nevertheless, because of the imprimatur, third parties made decisions on funding (for example, Proposition 71) that cannot be undone simply by a retraction of the papers. Further, in a rather bizarre twist, although Hwang's papers have been retracted, Hwang's patent applications have not been withdrawn.